HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The C team started the year by going top of Division C with an unexpected trouncing of League Leaders Wilmslow.

Picking the team was tricky as this is Wilmslow's first team and I expected we would be seriously out-graded.  In the home game in November we did well with Alan Hall and Chris drawing against Kevin Moran (160) and Colin Mills (147). Martin beat Chris Guffogg (126), but we lost on the bottom two boards. 

We expected to face a similar team last night, as these three have played in nearly every game, and our winning prospects seemed remote when I decided to pick our regular players.  However we arrived at our hosts excellent venue to find different opponents.

Without doubt the best chess of the night was played by Martin, so he was very disappointed to be the only one of us to lose. At one point Kevin declined a draw, but only because Wilmslow were two games down.  Martin then developed a "won position" (Kevin's words) with doubled rook on the C-file and Bishops on d6 and b5.  Hang on a minute an e-mail's just arrived from Martin with a diagram..

r2qrbk1/1b1n1p1p/3Bp1p1/1B1pP3/p2P4/P1R3P1/4QP1P/2R3K1 w - - 0 27

Nope that didn't work....

r2qrbk1/1b1n1p1p/3Bp1p1/1B1pP3/p2P4/P1R3P1/4QP1P/2R3K1 w - - 0 27

(Stop pratting about with that diagram - if they're interested they can work it out from there.  Ed.)

Toby finished first, so I presume he had an easy win, and I had my fourth decent result this year (notice you're not mentioning last year! Ed.).  A mistake by Tony Flynn let my pawn skewer his bishop and queen and he made matters worse by then letting me exchange the Queens. Another mistake, when his position was already lost, allowed me a nice finish.

Tony Kay spent the evening solidly defending against Robin Warhurst, Robin spent the evening looking for something that wasn't there.  His attack collapsed when he ran out of time and Tony won his Queen and the game.

Meanwhile Tony Doust's game had gone to a symmetrical finish; K+7 pawns each with 4v4 on one side and 3v3 on the other.  It looked drawn and it should have been - Tony's King had pushed Mike's King into a corner and Mike had only to repeat moves but failed to do so, the Fox ate some Chickens and a Queen was born.

                                         Wilmslow 1 - 4  Marple C

                                   1. K Moran       1 - 0   M Cutts

                                   2. R Warhurst   0 - 1   T Kay

                                   3.  A Flynn        0 - 1  N Dainty

                                   4.  M Garvin      0 - 1  A Doust

                                   5.  T Horrocks   0 - 1  T Brown